This paper presents a novel framework for 3D painterly rendering for photon mapping.
We introduce a new non-photorealistic rendering pass and integrate it within the
standard photon mapping pipeline. Our framework contains three passes. The photon
tracing pass casts photons to exploit a three-dimensional scene and holds photon information
in a data structure developed specifically for painterly rendering. The non-photorealistic
rendering pass constructs the sparse map and informative map which preserve
the attributes of strokes required for 3D painterly rendering. In this pass, we also employ
an impressionistic line integral convolution algorithm producing various types of painterly
rendering results. Finally, the rendering pass renders photorealistic objects generating
the final image consisting of the scene with both artistic painterly styles and global
illumination visual effects. We implemented our framework and developed an experimental
rendering system on a personal computer environment. To the best of our knowledge,
the proposed framework is the first that can take advantages of both global illumination
and 3D painterly rendering environment. Experimental results and rendered
images demonstrate the feasibility of our framework.

Received May 13, 2008; revised July 8, 2009; accepted September 10, 2009.
Communicated by Jiebo Luo.
* This work was partially supported by National Science Council, Taiwan, R.O.C., under the Grants No. NSC
95-2221-E-005-056, NSC 96-2221-E-005-090-MY2, and NSC 98-2221-E-005-073-MY3.